June 2, 2025
The Washington Post: "Thousands of Ukraine’s children vanished into Russia. This one made it back"
Illia’s mother died in the siege of Mariupol and Russian officials put him up for adoption — until his grandmother traveled into Russia to bring him home.
UZHHOROD, Ukraine — The boy from Mariupol still wasn’t ready to walk to the bus stop alone, so just before 8 a.m., he and his grandmother set off for school together. He reached for her hand, zipping her fingers in his own, and stole a sip of her coffee.
Illia Matviienko was almost 13 but still got lost easily. Three years had passed since his mother bled out in his arms after a Russian shelling, since a neighbor chipped her grave in the frozen winter of their yard, since soldiers found him alone and took him deeper into the occupied Donetsk territory, where he was put up for adoption.
There, he almost became a different boy: a Russian one.
Until his grandmother, Olena Matviienko, spotted him in a 26-second Russian propaganda video. Illia became an extraordinary test case for how, and whether, Ukraine could claw back its missing children — a journey that took Olena across four international borders and deep into Russia.
“I wouldn’t have found him if I didn’t see the video,” Olena, 66, said during three days of interviews last month at their home in Uzhhorod, in far western Ukraine. “He would be with a different family now. How much would he remember of who he was?”
Illia’s return in 2022 after weeks in a hospital in occupied Ukraine showed the difficulty of just getting back one child — let alone the tens of thousands of Ukrainian children now at the center of Kyiv’s demands for peace. Deported or disappeared into Russia, their plight has united American politicians to pressure President Donald Trump for their safe return and spurred war crimes charges against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his deputy, children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, for their illegal transfer — charges a Kremlin spokesman disputed as “outrageous and unacceptable.”